The Newtown Review of Books: from wordpress.com to wordpress.org

I’ve been working with the lovely people at The Newtown Review of Books (NRB) since the release of their first blog – a wordpress.com site – in March 2012.

Last year we began talking about a redesign, but as can often happen, initial designs were done, themes researched, functionality and the wish list formulated, and then life took over and progress was slow! This wasn’t really an issue – the site was working well, and what we’d been talking about was an enhanced version of already existed. Ultimately, the decision was made to move from a free blog at wordpress.com, to a self hosted WordPress site and a new ‘au’ domain.

Even though many people would say it’s easy and straight forward to pick up a substantial blog from one platform and plonk it straight into another, it’s not always that straight forward! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not really difficult so much as messy, and you do need to plan carefully! All sorts of things crop up along the way and the WordPress forums are littered with calls for help from people who have many issues with the transfer process!

The new site wish list included things like:

the site had to be responsive
the ability to integrate affiliate links to bookstores,
space for advertisers,
a donate button,
a dynamically generated A-Z of authors,
search highlighting,
better control over SEO, analytics and stats amongst other things, and
the ability to control how these worked – something that isn’t possible with a free site (even if you pay for upgrades).

And of course, it was time for a fresh new look that built on the original site.

Timing was important as well – because NRB post on a regular schedule (Tuesday, Thursdsay and Friday every week) the transfer had to be as smooth as possible so downtime really wasn’t an option! That said, there was a window of opportunity between Christmas and New Year to get everything done. I’d already set up the blog in its new domain, done most of the customisation, imported data from the ‘old’ site several times, identified anything that may cause a problem and generally had most of it set up ready for fine tuning. It was an intense few days but we made the deadline, although there were a couple of teething issues which were to do with thumbnail images and how they transferred from the “old” site.

Once the site was live, one of the biggest issues was how to ensure all the good SEO and backlinks weren’t lost – NRB was linked to from a huge number of sources and we didn’t want to have those all that goodness, or have to worry about whether or not individuals and organisations would update links to add ‘.au’ to every link which was the only change in the URL structure. I have to say that $13 for a domain redirect for 12 months was the best money NRB could’ve spent. WordPress were terrific too and our request to have subscribers and followers from the old blog transferred to the new one was done in a matter of 48 hours from initial request.

The site is based on the ‘Lucid‘ theme, with quite a lot of customisation! Plugins include Highlight Search Terms, Multi-Column Tag Map (for the A-Z), Paypal Donations, Filebase, Related Posts, comment customisation, and of course what is now an almost ‘standard’ set, including Jetpack, Antispam Bee, Wordfence Security, WordPress SEO and others to manage broken links, contact forms, and social media integration.